3D printing engineering parts: PLA vs ASA vs PC vs PP vs nylon vs tough resin

testing a range of engineering filaments for the biggest high school stem competition in the world [Music] if you've been following my channel you know that I've been modifying in into five to be an enclosed printer to print with a range of engineering elements you might also know that I enter my students into the f1 in schools competition and that these guys here are the current Australian champions preparing for the world files in Abu Dhabi I know a lot of people are interested in what's happening within the file so we'll start by recapping that in part one of the series I added an all metal hot end a high temperature capable wham-bam flexible bed as well as the first enclosure panels in a later part I added a design for the lid sealed on the side by nylon brushes since then I designed and printed some simple lugs to stop the live from having any chance of moving around and also these belt covers which stop the nylon brushes from having any chance of getting caught as well in the previous video I was using a heater cartridge on a heatsink with a fan to try and heat the chamber but it was massively underpowered a gentleman named rod in the comments pointed me towards a PTC self-regulating heater I found some cheap ones on eBay ordered them and they came pretty quickly I added insulation tape to all of my printed electronics enclosure as well as to the acrylic panels either side of the heater despite being mains powered the output of the heater was still underwhelming by this stage rod was in touch via email and giving me some much appreciated pointers on how to refine the setup I had two heaters two fans and the same mounting system as before except this time up to the top of the printer where it could provide heat at printing height the result was an improvement and I could just about hit 70 degrees inside when the heated bed was on at the same time as you'll see in this video that's not really quite enough and my setup is very inefficient with large gaps around that allow the hot air to escape so with that in mind here's a lesson in how to do it properly courtesy of a gentleman named Adrian you can see he's built a fully insulated enclosure around the 3d printer with thick foam blocks on the inside to stop heat escaping the stepper motors are cooled via water and all of the air inside the chamber is filtered and ducted out the room and look at the results enormous walk free abs parts so impressive and I'll be trying to adopt some of these principles as I refine my setup as for the people standing in the room with me I had a video vlog back in much detailing how they went to Melbourne for the Australian finals excelling at the many elements that make up this competition and ultimately winning through as Australian champions to compete overseas in Abu Dhabi in November now I have here a range of filaments that have been used to print a sample front wings designed by the team but normally you just printed in PLA so really we need a reason to use all of these different filaments to work out why our vocal Q&A with the team I'm Finn hey see the manufacturing engineer I met foster the graphic designer I'm Nicolas Hayes the design engineer and I'm Zack Burgess the collaboration manager and together we're Paradoxal if you saw the earlier video you might be wondering why the team is no longer called thrust vector and why is that the regulations make us combine women on the team our new name is paradox and in the earlier video we saw there was a big member so Ben what happened to Mira she had too many commitments so she decided to leave the team can you describe for people the nature of how the cars erased so the cars of racism 20 meter track they're around 100 km/h and they're propelled by carbon dioxide's in little slots into the back the cars finish by hitting of all the towers at the end of the track besides our testing we're going to do today what other types of testing do you do to develop your car we do various types of physical testing which involves gathering data about the cars actually run on the track we also do virtual testing through simulations of CFE computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis which is the structural testing of the car the test of strength so it sounds like this front wing goes through a lot when you're designing it what's important to get right in the design and how we're going to test that with these filaments the strength of the front wing how strong it can handle the force because decelerating at the end of the track which is estimated to be around minus 20 G once they're going to be testing their mass and weight on scales we have a minimum weight and we want to make sure we hit it we want to make sure that our rope wing is cost-effective spending the least amount are you getting the highest amount of quality looking to have the surface finish to minimize drag as easy to print as possible this little sanding is possible we want to make sure that our front wing is as accurate to the cat model as possible when we test this with calipers looking at this seems pretty simple is this your actual design for the competition no entirely because we've received a warning to do is a chance either tantal plagiarize our work and that's the real thing that's pretty high stakes for this competition being the biggest one in the world so we have to be limited in our testing but anyway let's proceed all of these filaments here are available on the x3d website most of them are extra deprogramming and there's also a form Futura one when I was printing them I tried to keep consistent specs that means the same layer height of 0.16 millimetres three shelves three on the bottom and four on the top but I vary the speed and the temperature as per the directions on the site as well as the feedback from the customers first up we have xod Pro PLA the regular price is $39 per kilo can quite often get on sale there's a multitude of colors and I find the quality of this really good yes they're my sponsor but I was already a customer before entering this arrangement PLA was included in this test as our baseline is easy to get it's affordable and it's quite easy to print it's the go to you filament for most ready printers so how did it compare I printed straight onto the wham-bam PX sheet at 60 millimeters a second no problems with adhering no need for a heated chamber and no warping the price for this brand is $40 per kilo and the mass is 4.9 7 grams the team ranked the surface finished 4th out of the six and found the accuracy a little bit average between point two two point four millimeters out I guess I should tune my flow rates as you might expect the PLA past the impact test with flying colors there was no damage and the part looked exactly the same as it did before the test the next filament was the X ray D pro nylon coming in at 55 dollars a kilo nylon is incredibly tough much stronger and more durable than PLA with a little bit of flex as well it has two Achilles heels it's not very easy to print and it's hydroscopic absorbing moisture from the air to avoid the moisture I unsealed all of these filaments immediately before printing the nylon peels straight off the PE X so I hit up the pressure chat to see if I could try there powder coated build plate they said yes but appealed straight off that as well the x3d website recommended painters tape so I put a layer down and it's stuck well stuck well to the tape but it still suffered from huge warping the dimensional inaccuracy is very clear in the final printed model when we look at the underside furthermore the interlay adhesion was off-the-charts which made it impossible to remove the support material I printed this slightly slower at 40 millimeters per second with a heated chamber but it still suffered from a lot of warping the price is 55 dollars per kilo the mass was out as a support material was still fused to it therefore the surface finish rank was low as well as a tolerance obviously people have success with nylon but my setup at the moment is just not up to it as you might expect the strength of the nylon was massively over engineered for this task next up x3d pro polycarbonate coming in slightly cheaper at 50 dollars a kilo like nylon it's meant to be much stronger than PLA or ABS not only that but it maintains its strength as the temperature increases and it doesn't shut out which means it's not very brittle compared to other filaments like nylon you need to store it carefully as it absorbs a lot of moisture from the air also like nylon it wouldn't stick to pei based sheets peeling off almost immediately this one I stopped early when it was only just still holding on I did get it to stick amazingly well to Bill tech probably too well with the wing breaking apart rather than separating from the build plate cleanly apart from this had actually printed quite cleanly with minimal warping but a few splits where the layers were starting to come apart more nozzle temp required for the next time this would only print successfully on buildtak at a really slow print speed the heated chamber seemed to keep warping to a minimum polycarbonate ranked highly for mass surface finish as well as accuracy polycarbonate did not fare well in the impact resistance strength test will no doubt get better results by tweaking the print settings but our needs that are easier to print better options available the next filament was x3d a si which is something I had never printed with before a si stands for acrylonitrile styrene acrylate and it's meant to have excellent strength properties but particularly good in the weather and against UV it says here it's widely used to prototype in the automotive industry and it also claims to be much easier to print a si is the same price as a polycarbonate at fifty dollars a kilo this stuff printed beautifully having no trouble sticking to the pH sheet and then flexing off perfectly surface finish wires I'd say it's a little bit cleaner than PLA and it had no warping it's also quite nice to the touch feeling slippery almost a little bit waxy this stuff was very easy to print with the recommended settings straight onto the wham-bam PE x heated to 110 degrees Celsius and a print speed of 40 millimeters per second I did use the heated chamber but I mentioned that I don't actually need it price is on par with the other filaments the mass was the second lightest of those tested and the surface finishing accuracy or right up the top as well the a si wing had no problems with the impact test retaining its shape with zero breakage overall I'm impressed with this and I look forward to using it again in the future our final FDM filament is polypropylene but a special one called Pegasus from form Futura it's not cheap at $65 for a 500 gram roll but they make some pretty big claims saying that this is most likely the lightest filament in the world to put that into numbers we're talking 20% lighter than the average polypropylene and 40% lighter than the average PLA there was no community comments for this filament therefore I had to go only buy the print guidelines on the site surprise number one was that this filament was actually very flexible it didn't have quite the same feel as TPU as it didn't really spring back it also has a strange texture not being glossy and rubbery like TPU but more like a wood filament polypropylene is commonly used for life hinges in bottles and other packaging which probably explains the Flex my end of 5 is fitted with an easier extruder which is normally grated flexibles but it was no match for this stuff it would regularly Jam and fail the print and require some cleaning out of the easier that was easy to do but I did need another solution so I turned to my flexi unfitted cocoon create touch which did a great job the surface finish is below average and there's a little bits of wisping and stringing on the edges the support material removed not really that cleanly and it's flexible as you might expect this filament requires no special build platform and no heated chamber and it prints at the moderate speed of 40 millimeters per second with a flexi on extruder the price is astronomical but it did live up to the claim of being incredibly light just over half the weight of PLA surface finish and accuracy were a bit below average being a flexible filament the impact test was never in doubt the wing retained its shape with no changes even on the thinnest sections a final material is resin in the form of properly tough resin now I've seen a great test from Stefan on CNC kitchen for this and I was keen to try it out myself I printed the wing on the moai with the new advanced acrylic plate as well as the chamber heater which is required for this tough resin I followed the peopple II wiki to get my settings for the machine as well as for the slicer I didn't attempt to hollow out the wing instead leaving it solid as it was already quite thin with this combination I managed to back-to-back prints perfectly reliably and cured them with the properly UV lamp for around 2 hours the top surface finish on the part is really outstanding with a layer height of 0.1 millimeters the downside is on the underside where the supports are removed there's lots of little puck marks that will need to be sanded off we also noted a little bit of distortion with left to right being slightly different I did use the heated chamber but there was minimal warping probably related to my model orientation the price is the second most expensive here and the mass is the heaviest but I think we can improve that with optimisation the team ranked the surface finish as best and any inaccuracies were bigger rather than smaller the impact tests were something I was really interested in and it passed with flying colors you can see there's a little bit of flex in the wing it showed no signs of snapping so we threw it at the tail as hard as we could I've actually ended up marking the table and the wing was perfectly fine afterwards compared to normal resin this is amazingly strong so we finished all about testing we've gone through all the criteria we planned so now it's time to have some conclusions so I've got some questions for the team guys which was the lightest wing considering mass is so important the life of swing was a probably problem anything it's meant to be the lightest filament in the world so how much lighter was it than the other ones it was about probably two two and a half grams lighter than most of them when you measure it with the calipers to see which ones were accurate which once passed the test a polycarbonate the SI and the poly propylene all pass the test when you felt the resin was a little bit what overall dimensionally a little bit yes a slightly milder than the rest of point next question was what's the best one to manufacture and since I printed these I'm happy to enter that one PLA was easy printed it a million times only other one that was super easy to do was that a si that promised easy printing and it definitely delivered event Thibault need the chamber for this one which means I can pick any of my printers which means we can probably get better quality if we choose this we have a pretty good drop test going there so which one's actually passed the spread of pests so out of the drug testing all of the wings did pretty well with only the polycarbonate actually fracturing on the stand aerodynamics is also really important so which one has the best surface finish thread out of the box to minimize skin friction best surface finish we found was the resin as it was very smooth there was a little bit of bumps on the underneath but that's easy to sand it up and overall out of this preliminary testing which filament would you be leaning towards or your front wing we've probably been leaning towards using the resin because it is very smooth the finish is excellent it's fairly fairly consistent whereas accuracy and the weight we can probably find ways of getting around that okay what would your second choice be if the resident workout our second choice would probably be the aasa' because it was extremely easy to preach as like all of the tests very well so some of you have probably printed some of these with a lot more success than I at home but that's okay because part of our design process is to test all of these back to back and then eliminate the ones that don't work as well for us it's perfectly acceptable to have failures as long as we can justify why we went in the other direction if you would like to support this team they're responsible for all of them and fundraising to get me and all of them over to Abu Dhabi in November if you can spare a few dollars as a link to their go fund me page in the description below if you've got any comments or any tips on what we can do to improve our performance please leave them in the comments thank you so much for watching until next time happy 3d printing yes g'day it's Michael again if you liked the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click Subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 267,938

Keywords: 3d print, 3d printer, 3d printed, 3d printing, resin, tough resin, engineering, nylon, pla, asa, polycarbonate, pc, pegasus pp, form futura, poplypropylene, abs, ender 5, creality, enclosed, high temp, wham bam, all metal hot end, warp, first layer, peopoly, moai, sla, fdm, x3d, tested, comparison, f1 in schools, impact strength, cost, surface finish, world final, gofundme, paradoxum, thrust vector, flexion, ptc heater, chamber heater

Id: O5V8iEjPiR0

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019